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Queer Square Mile
Queer Square Mile | Kirsti Bohata, Mihangel Morgan, Huw Osborne
4 posts | 1 read
QUEER SQUARE MILE: Queer Short Stories from Wales Edited by Kirsti Bohata, Mihangel Morgan and Huw Osborne This ground-breaking volume makes visible a long and diverse tradition of queer writing from Wales. Spanning genres from ghost stories and science fiction to industrial literature and surrealist modernism, these are stories of love, loss and transformation. In these stories gender refuses to be fixed: a dashing travelling companion is not quite who he seems in the intimate darkness of a mail coach, a girl on the cusp of adulthood gamely takes her father’s place as head of the house, and an actor and patron are caught up in dangerous game-playing. In the more fantastical tales there are talking rats, flirtations with fascism, and escape from a post-virus ‘utopia’. These are stories of sexual awakening, coming out and redefining one’s place in the world. Release and a certain heady license may be found in the distant cities of Europe or north Africa, but the stories are for the most part located in familiar Welsh settings – a schoolroom, a provincial town, a mining village, a tourist resort, a sacred island. The intensity of desire, whether overt, playful, or coded, makes this a rich and often surprising collection that reimagines what being queer and Welsh has meant in different times and places. The first anthology of its kind in Wales, which finally sheds light on a largely hidden queer cultural history with the careful selection of over 40 short stories (1837-2018). New translations of Kate Roberts, Mihangel Morgan, Jane Edwards, Pennar Davies and Dylan Huw make available their compelling stories for the first time to a non-Welsh speaking readership. Previously unpublished works by writers such as Margiad Evans and Ken Etheridge appear alongside better known favourites.
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Queer Square Mile | Kirsti Bohata, Mihangel Morgan, Huw Osborne
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This lengthy anthology presents two centuries of queer short fiction alongside a detailed introduction that situates the pieces within the wider Welsh literary tradition. The stories run the gamut from overt to subtextual along both the queer and Welsh spectrums and form a valuable introductory text, especially for anyone with an academic interest in queer and/or Welsh lit.

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Queer Square Mile | Kirsti Bohata, Mihangel Morgan, Huw Osborne
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I‘m now 70% into the tagged anthology. It‘s been interesting to read so much queer fiction from 100+ years ago alongside more contemporary work. The stories on offer range from the overtly queer to pieces where the subtext is so subtle you have to really, really WANT to see it—though in those cases, the referents might be more obvious to a Welsh person or to someone with a deeper understanding of 19th and early 20th century literary cues.

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Queer Square Mile | Kirsti Bohata, Mihangel Morgan, Huw Osborne
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I tackled the third story from QUEER SQUARE MILE while I ate a fake egg omelet and biked. The anthology starts with some older, heavily subtexty material, and it‘s got me thinking about how I‘m simultaneously tired of queer subtext and appreciative of how short fiction is so well suited to subtext of all kinds. Short fiction offers the reader a slice of an experience, not the sort of full immersion most novels aim for. Subtext is key to that.

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Queer Square Mile | Kirsti Bohata, Mihangel Morgan, Huw Osborne
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First book acquisition of 2022! The publisher kindly provided me with an ARC of QUEER SQUARE MILE, an anthology of 46 queer stories from Wales. I‘m excited to dive in.

Nutmegnc That looks interesting!!!! 2y
xicanti @Nutmegnc it‘s got such a large variety of stories, too! 2y
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